


A Function of Time

by scioscribe



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Artificial Intelligence, Heimdall is an Ancient Artificial Intelligence, M/M, Memory Loss, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-09-24 07:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20355010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: It had always been impossible to argue with Thor when he was like this.  Heimdall knew that—of all the memories he’d lost, those gilded by Thor’s presence were not among them.





	A Function of Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [days4daisy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/days4daisy/gifts).

On Asgard, Heimdall had had vast reserves of memory. His history—Asgard’s history—was embedded in the realm’s marble floors and crystal towers; encodings that would recall specific programming chains were scattered throughout the murals, sometimes disguised as golden runes and sometimes only as stray flecks of pigment, with their significance visible only to his well-trained, well-crafted eye.

On his own, off-world, he was a spar cut loose from his ship. It had been his responsibility to stand tall, holding out the full span of his unfurled knowledge like a sail, so the winds of fortune would catch and bear Asgard on to its future. And now, when that future was more uncertain than ever, he found that knowledge decimated.

He now had no memories but those which he currently had stored in this body.

“It’s impossible to quantify what has been lost,” he told Thor during one of their quiet late night conferences.

“Yes,” Thor said. He rubbed idly at his cheek, just below the patch on his eye. “I think we’re all feeling that way.”

Heimdall smiled. “Yes, only I meant it literally. I’m retaining whatever data intake is available—I can only serve a fraction of my true functions here, but I can at least begin to build up new reserves of our history. But the storage issues are—complicated. It doesn’t leave much room in my head for large-scale computations.”

Thor let his hand fall, baring his stubbled cheek, a little colorless from fatigue. His remaining eye suggested a certain incredulity. “I’m formally giving you an order—a _royal _order—not to exhaust yourself. The last thing we need is you crowding yourself out of your own life.”

“I am not alive,” Heimdall pointed out. “I don’t have a life to be crowded out of, only functions to fulfill. Valuable ones, I think.”

“No one’s disputing that.”

He was less sure of that than Thor seemed to be, but then, accuracy was included in his purpose; only certainty was required of a king, who could will a thing into being. But Heimdall knew there had always been those who were disconcerted by him. Occasionally they hid it beneath contempt—“that over-gilded watchman,” Hela had called him once, millennia ago—or geniality—“Good to still see you about,” someone had said to him just yesterday. “A portable landmark, like breaking off a statue at the pedestal.” On Asgard, Asgard in its prime, his place had gone unquestioned, no matter what feelings swirled around it. But now… well, he was not a living thing, not truly, and yet he needed the fuel of one. He used up supplies like anyone else. He had battled Hela, but he could choose for the wounds he’d sustained there to not pain him. The others could not. He knew that difference rankled.

He was resented, just a little, and his role was no longer essential enough to prevent that resentment from festering. He’d like to make it so again—more for Thor’s sake than his own. Thor’s liking for him hadn’t gone unnoticed.

It would be better, Heimdall thought, if the people believed their king placed his trust wisely. And thus far, they did not; they almost _could _not. His council was too motley: a drunken runaway Valkyrie, a traitorous Frost Giant brother, a beast who was also a Midgardian, and the feigned man Heimdall, designed by nine mothers before anyone living had even been born. Altogether questionable.

Temporarily, he could perhaps shift the opinion in his favor. In the long run, unquestionably, the others could do the same, if they held true—and it was his suspicion that they would, even Loki. They would turn bright and shining in the annals of history. Thor would ultimately be vindicated, but without his full memory, without millennia of stories to consult, Heimdall was forced to put more stock in the now.

And _now_, all he could nudge was his own reputation. Less glorious than that of the others, but easier to course-correct.

“I mean,” he said carefully, “that I will serve you best if you don’t deceive yourself as to my nature. I am here for you to consult as necessary—my _life_, as you put it, is not a factor.”

“Your consciousness, then,” Thor said. “You know what I mean. Your… apparatus.”

Heimdall raised his eyebrows. “My apparatus?”

“I’ve definitely heard that word somewhere recently,” Thor said.

“Yes. Loki used it earlier to describe the battery-powered phalluses in Storeroom C.”

“Oh, that’s right.” The little flicker of humor slid across Thor’s face, like a knife whittling away some outermost layer of bark, showing a streak of golden quickness beneath all the toil. “Not that, then. But there you go—your memory’s fine.”

“I should hope it is _that _fine,” Heimdall said dryly, “since the conversation was only this morning and was otherwise… distinctive.”

“I’d never seen a Hulk blush,” Thor said, nodding.

“It’s a recent memory, Thor. And not a noteworthy one. I’ve lost—allowed to be destroyed—my knowledge of wars and civilizations and reigns—”

“What I’ve noted,” Thor said, with unusual sharpness, “you can be sure I consider noteworthy. I asked for wisdom and you produced it, as you always do. There, it’s been formally noted by the king.” He leaned back in his chair. It interested Heimdall that Thor often took poses wildly at odds with his true mood. He rarely seemed as relaxed as when his intentions were firmly fixed. “If you’ve come here to try to persuade me I should mourn still more for the fall of Asgard, I don’t know what to tell you, Heimdall. I have mourned all I can stand. And if you’ve come here instead to persuade me that you are—what? Useless? Diminished? Not the man you were? I won’t hear that either. You’re still you.”

Thor had always been this way—Heimdall had memory enough to know that. He too was still himself, only clarified: the blunt brutality of the hammer traded for the illuminating glory of lightning.

Thor’s voice was lower as he said, “Now, if you want to tell me what you’ve lost, how _you _feel it, _that _I will listen to. But not this. You are far more to me than your memory. And if we’d saved every last damn knowledge-cell from Hela’s destruction and Surtur’s fire but lost you, we’d be the poorer for it.”

Heimdall knew when to concede. “Thank you, then.”

It had always been impossible to argue with Thor when he was like this. Heimdall knew that—of all the memories he’d lost, those gilded by Thor’s presence were not among them. Those, he had hoarded and kept close.

*

Saved:

Thor, young and in his cups, arrogant and bullheaded and strangely innocent: he had stayed with Heimdall in the Observatory long after his friends had left, had stayed to swill more mead and make grand proclamations about the battles he would fight and the great deeds he would do.

“You see far,” he said, stumbling a little as he collapsed against the bench. When he stretched out to lay down, he had a proud smile on his face, as if he’d pulled off an especially complex maneuver: Heimdall, incapable of drunkenness himself, couldn’t say either way. “You see _much_. I ask you, Heimdall, is there anyone like me anywhere?”

“No,” Heimdall said, though truthfully he’d thought many times that the answer was _yes_; even the universe’s outliers eventually formed their own averages. Thor was strong and brave, but there was strength and bravery elsewhere, even in Asgard; they were, after all, traits the realm valued. But he had no established protocol against lying, not now. Odin had cleared him of that, after Hela’s fall, after the reforms and renewals.

Heimdall had told many lies in the last handful of centuries, sometimes for the king’s purposes and sometimes, more elusively, for his own.

He wasn’t sure whose he served in lying now.

“No,” he said, “there are none like you.”

Thor laughed, drunk and hearty, and pointed at him—or, as his hand drifted somewhat, at Heimdall, at the wall, at the Bifrost sword. “You lie.” He grabbed his cup off the floor and attempted to drink from it while still lying down. “You lie because you’re fond of me. I’ve never known your truths to flatter anyone. Ever, ever, ever.”

It showed greater insight than Heimdall had known him to possess. He marked the memory in his mind, tagging it with a golden notch, a kind of flag that said: _There is something here worth considering._

Saved:

Thor, standing on the bridge after Loki’s fall, looking down into the Void where his brother had vanished, tears drying on his cheeks. “I didn’t know how to help him, Heimdall. I didn’t even know he—” He sucked in a deep breath. “And now he’s gone.”

“You will see him again,” Heimdall said quietly. He did not like Thor standing so close to the edge—yet he did not think Thor yearned for self-destruction, nor did he think him clumsy enough to slip, so why care? He could not trace the pathway the thought took through his mind. “You’ll meet each other in Valhalla.”

“Father doesn’t believe that,” Thor said, looking up. His crystal-blue eyes were sharp beneath their sheen of tears. “He didn’t even speak the word at Loki’s funeral.”

“It is hard,” Heimdall admitted, “to think of your brother carousing amongst the tables in the hall, or in the peace of Freyja’s field. But that does not mean it is impossible. He died in battle with himself, and I see no reason why that should not qualify. And you—” (This was still in the days when he could speak of Thor’s sometime death as an inevitability, melancholy but not unbearable to him.) “And as you will one day be there yourself, and as he always dogged your heels, I’m sure he will at least join you someday, if he is not there already.”

“He seemed to hate me, at the end.”

“The end,” Heimdall said, “is not all that matters.”

Thor’s smile in the darkness, swift and bright as a falling star. He was, Heimdall thought, very much like his mother; it had not been in Odin’s bloodline to be so appreciative of so small a kindness.

Saved:

Thor, smiling once again.

Heimdall had watched—from his usual distance—as Thor badgered and charmed and bribed the palace kitchen to prepare him a kind of enormous picnic lunch with everything from sweet rolls to flagons of wine. He had dismissed the sight quickly. Thor was seeking another conquest, no doubt. Heimdall could turn his gaze to him later on in the evening, simply out of curiosity to see which of Thor’s possible bedmates might require actual _courtship_.

It was possible, of course, that Thor’s intended for that night did not demand romance as a prelude to bed-sport but that Thor wished to give it regardless.

Heimdall looked between the stars, stretching out his line of sight as far as it would go, as though he could send his mind away the same distance. It nearly worked; he was almost startled when Thor laid a hand on his shoulder.

“My prince. Would you like me to open the Bifrost?”

“No,” Thor said. He hoisted up the basket the kitchens had loaded for him; it was heavy enough that even _his _arms twitched a little with the strain. “I want you to take a look at Earth. To be precise, to something called the ‘Stanley Cup Finals.’ It’s the championship honor bout for a sport called ‘hockey’ that Stark introduced me to. It should be starting now—I think I have the time differential sorted out. And if not, well, there’s still food.”

“You want me to find you this ‘hockey’ bout,” Heimdall said. “And send you there?”

Thor shook his head. “I’ve heard it’s often customary to watch the deciding battle from a distance. In the company of a friend.” He tapped his temple. “You can share the sight with me, can’t you?”

No one had ever asked Heimdall to interfere with their mind. However fervently or wistfully they wished they could see as he saw, they did not like the prospect of being tampered with; he had learned, thousands and thousands of years ago, that there was generally no point in offering. He almost asked how Thor had even known it was a possibility, but that was foolish—Heimdall’s specifications were all tucked away somewhere in Asgard’s Vault. Thor need only have looked.

Heimdall wondered what else he had seen there, on those ancient tracings of programming script and organic sorcery. Other abilities might have also drawn his attention.

“I can grant you some of my vision,” Heimdall said. “For a time.”

“I’d hoped so. Then would you like to watch the bout with me?”

This wasn’t a behavior forbidden by his programming. By generous interpretation, it even fit within it, in the category of general service to the royal family of Asgard.

But once he would still have turned away. He would have said—truthfully—that to do this was not his function. His mind had been more rigid once, in the days when his designers had still lived, when Asgard had still thought of science and magic as essences that twined together. That time had been gone for centuries. No one had touched the pathways of his mind in all that time, and the only neural changes had been ones he himself had wrought.

“I’d enjoy that,” Heimdall said. His sight flitted along Earth, seeking out what Thor described to him—a field of indoor ice, ringed by a throng of people and recording devices. “But you’ll have to tell me what I’m looking at.” He could feel the nanite and seidr threads in the air, binding him to Thor, and accessed them, opening his visual input field to the correct synapses in Thor’s brain. He knew he’d done it when Thor’s eyes turned gold.

He waited for Thor to tell him to withdraw at once, but Thor said only, “You’re a marvel, Heimdall,” with enough warmth in his voice that Heimdall was glad Thor could not see his reaction to it.

Indeed, except for the hockey, Thor couldn’t see anything at all—he groped about for the picnic and began messily serving it by touch alone. A great deal of spilled wine began to soak into the grooves of Heimdall’s armor.

“Each side is called a team,” Thor was saying. “One team hopes, by cunning and superior strength, to place a small disk in a net owned by the other team. They move it across the ice with curved sticks. I’d like to have us all play it here, we could improve upon it magnificently. Would you like more of whatever wine I’m holding?”

“It might be wiser for me to serve you,” Heimdall said. He appreciated the way the definitions, the intentions, of that could stack, could mount up like bricks making a wall; who would then look too closely at any one brick, any one meaning? He served Thor. That was all that mattered.

*

Yes. Those memories, and others like them, Heimdall had kept.

Now Thor dragged his finger along the damp edge of his goblet, making the glass sing out. “Do you remember—” He cut himself short.

“Perhaps not,” Heimdall said. “But you can always ask.”

“It isn’t really about Asgard,” Thor said. A dim color had crept into his cheeks. “More about—your nature. Your life.”

Heimdall’s sensory input increased, as it usually only did when there was a distinct danger to respond to: he was aware of the exact quantity of moisture in the air, the smell of wine on Thor’s breath, the faint vibration of the ship’s engines, the distant sound of footsteps. He could see, more than anything else, the hint of light now in Thor’s eye, a kind of exhausted hopefulness. For its sake, Heimdall would ignore whatever tremor of fear had triggered his alarms.

He said again, “You can ask.”

Thor’s mouth tilted oddly, in an expression Heimdall had no clear name for. “Do you have to let me do what I want? Are you bound to that?”

“Once. Once and for a long time. But lately—” He shrugged. “I have a handful of treasons to my name by now. Once I would have been on the scrap heap for that, whatever reasons there were in my favor. I suppose if you gave me cause to deny you, you’d know.”

“I wanted to know,” Thor said, shaping the words as carefully as if they were in a foreign tongue, “if you remembered the time I found you with that man. Njal.”

_Njal_—the name did bring something to mind. He remembered—

_It is my duty to preserve all there is, but I do not have to carry it_.

—choosing to forget, choosing to leave the memory on Asgard to burn. He didn’t know why he had decided not to remember.

Heimdall said, “Tell me what happened.”

He saw that Thor was considering dropping the matter where it was, but surrender, as Thor had said, as Heimdall had seen him say, was not in his nature. “I came to the Observatory to see you.” He said that like it was a natural thing others also did; for all Thor had once asked to be thought exceptional, he had never known all the ways in which that was true. “But you had company already. Sweaty, enthusiastic company—not particularly well-endowed either, if I’m going to be honest. And I don’t know if you know it, but he wrote truly ghastly poetry, I mean, rhymed ‘Asgard’ with ‘my heart,’ it was ridiculous. And of course, very nobly, I tried to simply back out, but Njal saw me.”

Heimdall couldn’t remember that particular encounter, but he could remember others, and they were mostly the same. He waited for Thor to continue.

“He invited me to join you,” Thor said. “I nearly did. You looked—there’s no way to tell you how you looked, Heimdall, spread out against the floor, naked when I’d almost never even seen you out of armor. Your hair was down. It was like seeing the sun turned inside out and finding it all the more beautiful that way. You must have seen all that in my face—I suppose that’s why you dropped the memory off as soon as you could. You didn’t want to know, and there I was shouting it.”

“No. That would never be why.”

“No?”

He had known of Thor’s infatuation, yes; he had treasured it as the strangest, most delicate gift anyone had ever given him. He'd known he could not have it, but he was used to a lack of possession, used to looking without touching. And this was such a new sight to him, that light of affection in Thor's eyes, just when he'd thought the universe could have no more novelty.

Heimdall said, “I swear that to you.”

Thor breathed in and took up his story once more. “I moved towards you. And then Njal, damn him, said, ‘He can do anything you want him to. He’ll spoil you for fucking anyone real.’ As though you were—”

“An apparatus,” Heimdall said. He found the insult so trivial, so ordinary, that it made him smile a little to see how thunderous Thor’s displeasure at it was. But then his smile faded. “You struck him.”

“You do remember,” Thor said. There was a wash of strange emotions in his voice, an ache of loneliness and hurt and confusion. “What was this, Heimdall? A test to see if I’d tell you the truth?”

“No,” Heimdall said quietly. “I know you hit him for the same reason I know, without remembering myself, that all you’re saying is true. I know _you_.”

And—though he left this unspoken—he knew himself, too. He knew that, with Asgard still in its gleaming splendor, with the world around them intact but with the royal family already bruised, the realm’s opinion of them shaky—he knew that he would have needed to forget that Thor had defended his honor. He could live on, as he always had, knowing that Thor desired him. But this—this would make it too hard to stand back, untouched and untouchable. He could not know—could not afford to remember—that Thor might love him.

“I could not let him speak about you that way,” Thor said. “But then you and I—we never spoke of it again ourselves. Why not, Heimdall?”

It did not matter that he only had the tale now and not the memory—the effect was the same. He did not want to let go, however much his duty demanded it. “Because you were a prince—now a king—and I was forged in the heart of Asgard.”

“We’re all forged somewhere.”

“Not literally.”

“Oh, you’re very literal tonight,” Thor said.

"If you'd wanted only what Njal wanted, I could have given that to you. For years, I gave that much to almost anyone who asked. But what you wanted, what I wanted to give you—that was impossible."

Thor's gaze was steady. "But you did want. You still do, don't you?"

He told the truth, though it would have been wiser to lie: "Yes. Still."

"And it's _here _that you find cause to deny me?" Thor said. "Of all the ill-conceived notions I've had over the years, you're certainly not one of them. I don't know why we couldn't—"

“You could have feigned ignorance for me once,” Heimdall said, “but you’ve lost the capacity for it now. You know what people would say. That’s far from meaningless when you’re king and your subjects are already demoralized.”

“Then that’s why you never talked about it,” Thor said. “It can’t be why you made yourself forget.”

Heimdall said, “I made myself forget in the hope that I wouldn't want what I cannot have. That’s the advantage my nature has over yours, I suppose.”

Thor had at last run out of wine. “Maybe one of many.” He leaned forward and took Heimdall’s hand in his; the heat of his skin was incredible. Fear and desire magnified Heimdall’s senses yet again, giving him every whorl of Thor’s fingerprints, every brush of Thor’s touch along the small hairs on the back of Heimdall’s hand. “Whether or not it’s my job as king to ignore that I love you—and that, so far as I can tell, you love me in return—it isn’t my job to allow Asgard to stumble on thinking your nature makes you lesser. If Asgard is a people, you are among them—or the name has no meaning at all.”

“Even you can’t bend a whole realm to your opinion,” Heimdall said, but then he thought of the Valkyrie, who’d been so long in her exile but stood now at Thor’s side, and Loki, who had at last come home. Perhaps Thor would remake their world, after all.

Thor seemed to read all that in his eyes. “I love a challenge.” He lowered his head and brushed his lips against Heimdall’s knuckles. His mouth was softer than Heimdall would have thought. He said, “And whatever people might say, they are not here now.”

Heimdall looked beyond their walls. What remained of Asgard hummed around them still, mourning and longing and frightened and desperate to have something to hold on to. They needed their stability.

But he was Asgardian too, if Thor was right. He had his own need.

And it was true, undeniably so, that there was no one here to see them. There were reasons—good reasons—to refuse Thor nonetheless; he’d buried none of those memories or chains of logic. They were with him still.

But he ignored them, reaching around Thor’s head instead, putting his fingers in the softness of Thor’s shorn hair. He turned the past away entirely. For now, he let them both do as they wanted.


End file.
